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Our new default theme lets you create a responsive magazine website with a sleek, modern design.

Feature your favorite homepage content in either a grid or a slider. Use the three widget areas to customize your website, and change your content's layout with a full width page template and a contributor page to show of your authors.

Creating a magazine website with WordPress has never been easier.

(Screenshots to come. Trying out both a device-layout with tablet, phone, and laptop and a more traditional chrome-less homepage example.)

To really hammer in the responsive aspect, maybe each section could include a different device by the main screenshot showing an alternate view at the various screen sizes. For example, put a Nexus 7 next to the theme screenshot with the grid view.

Skipped the high-fidelity mockup and decided to go straight to code. 26387.diff​ is my first draft of the About page. It includes the text from matveb / lancewillett / lessbloat, but is currently missing images.

shaunandrews: I like your idea of pushing responsive. Let's do it.

For the very first image on the page, the full-width image underneath "Introducing a new, modern admin design", I was thinking it could be fun to do something fun like the top image on ​http://vip.wordpress.com/, or have some sort of animation featuring different color schemes.

Updated with a progress shot and patch of what I have so far. Still very much a work in progress. ryelle is going to build a color scheme previewer into the page tomorrow while iammattthomas and I continue to work on screenshots and style tweaks.

It seems odd that we don't mention the name of our new default theme. "Twenty Fourteen: A Sleek New Magazine Theme"?

We should keep in mind that for a lot of users, this page will be the first time they see the new admin design. If they don't know about MP6/the new design, it might be a jarring experience (think about the first time you saw MP6). We should ensure that we ease users into it by removing all recollections of the old design.

In that vein, we should drop or change the browser chrome on the first image (and maybe remove the iPhone, we have plenty of other responsive device pics below). OSX's window styling represents everything we moved away from in the new design: low-contrast/gray, gradient, glassy buttons, nibbled corners, and the big shadow on the whole thing. If we really want to show a browser window, Windows 8 fits a lot better, but showing it framelessly would be best, so that all of the visuals are consistent with the new admin design right at the start.

Also, I know they're still in-progress, but we should make sure that all of the screenshots are consistent in either showing or hiding the browser UI chrome. Currently they're mixed-and-matched.

26387.4.diff​ adds the color scheme picker to the about page. Just as a preview, this does not auto-save. Also removes the password meter CSS/JS.
I noticed a bug with color scheme preview & RTL- fixed in about.js, see #26455.

Unless iammattthomas has some design tweaks to the images I posted, the only thing we're really missing now is text for the bottom three "under the hood" callouts. Does anyone want to take a stab at writing something for those?

Unless iammattthomas has some design tweaks to the images I posted, the only thing we're really missing now is text for the bottom three "under the hood" callouts. Does anyone want to take a stab at writing something for those?

I think we need to figure out what they're actually going to be. I'll try to drum something up in IRC.

I do agree with Drew on that. I'm curious if we could change the image for "A new theme experience". I think if that is just a screenshot it would look a bit better. Then the images would be: mobile - screen - mobile - screen - mobile if you know what I mean.

About screen: Only show the pick-a-color section if there are 2 or more of the eight new color schemes available. And only show the eight core schemes.

This hides the section in develop.svn /src's directory (use /build for colors) and when a plugin is manipulating/unregistering colors. In both situations, which are rare, losing the section is fine.

This removes a fallback image as we were previously showing the section in these cases; the rest of the page shows off the design (and color opportunities) well enough on its own to avoid this confusing section.

In [26799]: About page: Don't load zxcvbn, which is a dependency of an unused piece of user-profile.js.

Normally I would split user-profile.js here, moving the admin-color-scheme-picker bits into a separate file. At this stage in the game, though, that's a lot of work for something that is temporary for 3.8. I'd rather keep it as one file for now, pending future JS cleanup/reorganization.

Regarding file compression in [26806], I think we should serve these from WP.org (as we did in 3.6; 3.7 didn't have substantial images) and keep them out of the download package. That said, I'd want to save 615 KB for a user even in that case.

Here is a summary of changes of 26387.11.diff​ from me and markjaquith (not brief, but at least it's briefer than the 2.5-hour call).

Modern new design

"the admin" is shorthand. Refactor to "the new WordPress dashboard". Our alternative, "administration area, doesn't sound as catchy here. Deliberately don't capitalize dashboard, that gives it too much weight on the page.

"Open Sans is Open Source" is only a little better than "Open Sans meets Open Source." It is still fairly nonsensical and doesn't explain clearly what Open Sans is. So let's do that. Also, see the the freedoms page for canonical capitalization of open source.

Kicks the contrast text up a few notches. "high contrast" is usually crapped on as being ugly. Let's make it clear it doesn't need to be.

Every device

Let's not (glibly, accidentally) suggest someone owns every gadget under the sun.

Killing blurry edges is a nice sell for vectors, but we already had retina UI. (This is why "High definition is here" was tweaked; we had "Retina Ready" on 3.5's about page.) What are the benefits to the user? Colors (don't need to mention that here) and performance. Let's discuss how loading Dashboard -> Home is 40% the size it was in 3.7! Huge speed improvements are a great win.

A new theme experience

This section was mostly filler. We tried to punch it up, but it was covering mundane details or things what weren't really new in 3.8 (or even changed in 3.8). It needed to be reduced to what's important. It's a great new screen, so let's sell it as a better browsing experience and then let them try it out. Keep in mind only so many people have lots of themes installed. The installer refresh is going to be higher impact.

Widgets. Since the themes section is really short, let's instead talk about "Refined theme management" and also talk about the widget changes. The responsive breakpoints and click-to-add are both solid little refinements that deserve a mention.

(decision point) We can drop "Drag-drag-drag. Scroll-scroll-scroll." and nothing is lost, but we kind of liked it.

(to do) We don't think widgets needs to be part of the screenshot, but the screenshot should be shrunk a bit. We were toying with just cropping the bottom 55 pixels, but if MT had other ideas, that's fine too. Some whitespace at the bottom of the text is good, though.

Twenty Fourteen

We're not sure "Creating a magazine website with WordPress has never been easier" is the message we want to send. Twenty Fourteen is not the only magazine theme out there; we don't want to suggest the others all suck.

"most intrepid" rather than "boldest". Intrepid is an excellent adjective that captures both design and new reaches in functionality. Also, in our opinion, Twenty Thirteen was bolder. Let's leave that adjective for Twenty Thirteen (we actually did use it on the about page) and give Twenty Fourteen its own platform to stand on.

"compromise", not "compromise on".

End with with what was originally the first sentence. It makes for a terrific closing line and also helps end the entire about page on a great note.